Tuesday, March 09, 2010

EC Papers Up

I was surprised in the acceptance letter to find that there were 45 acceptances out of 136 papers -- an acceptance rate of about 1/3. (Compare with WSDM.) This makes it one of the less "competitive" CS conferences I know of, although a little research shows this is a bit unusual -- last year the numbers were 40/160 or so, so they accepted more papers and had fewer submissions this year. Is that a trend in the making or an accident of timing this year? Also, while I'm an EC newbie, the list of papers looks very interesting, with plenty of top-tier names. "Competitive" or not, I'm expecting high quality. I'm really looking forward to it -- and not just because its location makes it remarkably convenient for those of us in the greater Boston area.

Oh, please. The fact that I have great respect for people like Muthu, Tim Roughgarden, Ramesh Johari, Joan Feigenbaum, Edith Cohen, and many many of the other authors and look forward to seeing their work at the conference is a bad thing?

This is the lowest number of submissions in several years, and the highest acceptance rate since 2001.

The other interesting thing is the apparent lack of papers by "real" economists. It makes one wonder how much interaction there is between the two sides of the Econ/CS "community" and whether this is just turning into an echo chamber.

Anon #4: For our paper -- on Swoopo -- all the other papers I know have been by economists. (I just saw one economist give their "job talk" on his Swoopo work over at MIT.)

One issue is that economists (like some other fields) seem to have a different publication paradigm -- it's not clear that publishing in a conference like EC is "useful" to them. The economist giving the job talk -- whose paper was still a working paper -- lamented that we could just send out paper to a conference, while his working paper would go through years of "informal" review before being sent into a journal...

@anon7: Just dont bother man. Take on hard problems, take on problems you enjoy and tell people about it, wherever they are interested in listening. Brand name, hot areas, statistics will just eventually kill it for you. Pick up a job in a teaching school if you have to, but enjoy your work, I think that is most important. Good luck!!